Ceci Moss is the Assistant Curator of Visual Arts at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and an Adjunct Professor at San Francisco Art Institute. She is responsible for coordinating several exhibitions (both solo and group shows) each year, special projects, public art commissions, and public programs for YBCA. Highlights include solo exhibitions by Jacqueline Kiyomi Gordon, Lucy Raven, Nate Boyce, Shana Moulton, and Brenna Murphy, a large scale public art installation by Kota Ezawa in YBCA’s sculpture court, and YBCA’s signature triennial Bay Area Now 7 co-curated with Betti-Sue Hertz. She also co-curated with Astria Suparak the exhibit Alien She that examines the lasting influence of the punk feminist movement Riot Grrrl on contemporary artists, and toured to five venues nationwide.

She has a MA and PhD in Comparative Literature from New York University, and a BA in History and Sociology from U.C. Berkeley. Her academic research addresses contemporary internet-based art practice and network culture. Her PhD dissertation "Expanded Internet Art and the Informational Milieu" examines the expansion of internet art beyond the screen in the 2000’s, especially towards sculpture and installation, as a product of what theorist Tiziana Terranova called an “informational milieu.” Combining art history and media theory through the analysis of case studies that range from internet art and social media in the 2000’s to Jean-François Lyotard’s groundbreaking new media exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in 1985 Les Immatériaux, her dissertation asks how the widespread technological capture of information affects cultural production, specifically contemporary art, and the kind of critical response it necessitates.

Her writing has appeared in Rhizome, Art in America, ArtAsiaPacific, Artforum, The Wire, Performa Magazine, New Media & Society and various art catalogs. Prior to her position at YBCA, she was the Senior Editor of the art and technology non-profit arts organization Rhizome, Special Projects Coordinator for the New Museum/Rhizome and an Adjunct Instructor at New York University in the Department of Comparative Literature. From 2000-2014, she programmed a radio show dedicated to experimental music, Radio Heart, on the independent radio stations KALX, East Village Radio and Radio Valencia.

New York-based musician and artist Eli Keszler integrates piano wire into his compositions in a way that falls between installation and improvisation. For Cold Pin, motorized beaters controlled by a generative sequence struct 14 piano strings hung across the wall of Boston's Cyclorama in 2011. Keszler then invited Ashley Paul, Greg Kelley, Reuben Son and Benjamin Nelson to play off the work, improvising alongside the randomized clunks, scraps, and bangs emanating from the wall.

His recent L-Carrier at Eyebeam complicated this format by activating the motors in tandem with a changing visual score designed by Keszler. Hosted on a dedicated website commissioned by Turbulence, these images evolved when visitors tripped up "targets" on the site that interfere with the code, modifying the pattern of the motors. On June 7, Keszler again played in a seven piece ensemble in conjunction with the installation, including musicians Ashley Paul, Anthony Coleman, Alex Waterman, C Spencer Yeh, Catherine Lamb, Geoff Mullen, and Reuben Son.

In both compositions accompanying Cold Pin and L-Carrier, the installation serves not as a simple backdrop, but a central element. On their own, the installations continue to have a commanding presence. Unlike the extended resonating tones of Ellen Fullman'sLong Stringed Instrument, which meditatively fill a room, Keszler's approach to auditory space reveals his training as a percussionist, where the plucks are akin to hits - busy, feverish and complex. Taken out of an enclosed environment, such as in Collecting Basin, piano wire is not only responsive to the whims of the motor beaters but also the wind and the elements. Here, Keszler hung the wire from a large water tower, transforming an industrial space into an open air instrument.

This post is part of a new monthly series of guest curated mixes for the Rhizome blog, entitled Wavelength.

JAPANESE NOISE: A REMINDER

Compiled Summer 2012 by C. Spencer Yeh

Back
when I was an undergraduate and involved with college radio, we would hold
educational meetings covering a wide variety of music by genre, artist, and
geography. I was very much in thrall of the Japanese musical underground
at the time, so I developed a presentation and this was the handout I made as
an accompaniment. [See above.]

I’ve
noticed
the term ‘noise’ thrown around quite a bit lately, to encompass
particular
variations of form, ideology, and even affect, within organized sound
culture.
I generally have no qualms with what 'noise' can now
mean and manifest. With that said, Japanese noise is my preeminent
definition of 'noise'–my first and most formative experience. The birth
and development of Japanese noise is singular, defined by
its relation to time and place, to culture and aesthetic. Japanese
noise taught me about freedom, fetish, listening, autodidactism,
self-mythology, self-publishing, senzuri.

The
selections for this mix date from the mid-'80s to the early '00s, are edited for length, and intentionally eschew the
array of strategies in the scene (often deployed under the same project name) to focus on NOISE.
Big parties can be a blast, but once in a while, a long visit with an old
friend is incredibly fulfilling and necessary.

Wavelength is a new series for Rhizome’s blog that will
examine sound art and music, with some attention towards the technologies that
enable them. One significant aspect of Wavelength will be thematic guest
curated mixes, which will appear on the blog monthly.

The notion of
“feedback” is an important element for your sonic sculptures, where the
viewer/listener is pulled into and directed by the work. As you stated in our
visit, “What you hear affects how you move and how you move affects how you
hear.” Your work SA-3, which you developed as a MFA student at Stanford, is a
prime example of this technique. Could you discuss this piece and your research
going into the project?

Well, for that piece it really started with noticing the
moment in which I would become conscious of a localized sound, and how that awareness
would pull me into or out of a particular relationship to the space. You could
say an in-body/out-of-body type mediation. Through research in sound
localization I learned of various directional speaker technologies and I
combined that with an ongoing interest in how and why speaker systems are
installed and controlled.

I was already looking into military projects involving sound
as well as new developments in sound system technology. Talking with some folks
at Meyer Sound in Berkeley, I was particularly interested in their
Constellation system and their long-range speakers while I was also learning
about spatial sound at
Stanford’s CCRMA (Center for Computer Music and Research in Acoustics). I came across the “audio spotlight” by
Holosonics and the LRAD speakers at the time made by American Technologies.
These both use ultra sonic transducers that heterodyne into an audible
frequency controlling the localization of the sound through the inherent
directionality of ultrasonic waves. The police and military are using the LRAD
as hailing devices and have occasionally used them for crowd dispersal, a
technique which is super dangerous because the key component of these speakers
is that the user can control them without affecting their own ears. The person
in control of the sound can inhabit the same space with those that it affects,
while remaining immune to its force. Never before has this been the case. There’s
a frightening disjunction in that control loop. So I was doing this research
and I found a few really cheap small ultrasonic speakers on EBay and combined
them into a hanging speaker array loosely based off of one of the Meyer Sound
systems. I have always been attracted to the hanging speaker arrays and wanted
to combine the ultrasonic speaker technology with the aesthetics of the stadium
speakers to address the ways these more known systems control our bodily
relationship to sound. In a theater or
performance setting there’s a loop between the performer, the sound engineer,
the speaker system and the audience that returns back to the performer. With
the LRAD system there’s a different loop where the person controlling the sound
(performer and the sound engineer) do not experience the sound, yet they could
see their “audience.”

Going back to SA-3, I wanted to play between those
experiences by having the speakers of SA-3 play the sounds that you as a viewer
make in the gallery. A mirror of sorts where you control what the sound is but how
you chose to place yourself inline with the directionality of the speakers
decides how you experience that sound in space. The audience is the performer.
And I guess, as the designer of this system, I am the sound engineer.

You originally studied painting as an undergraduate. How did this spark or inform your interest in perspective? How and when did you begin to investigate 3D digital imaging software (like Maya) and its use of perspective?

When studying painting I became interested in the viewer's physical relationship to the image and that naturally led into thinking about perspective. Since then, a lot of my paintings have been composed from a one-point perspective with the idea that the scene is drawn from the perspective of the viewer as they are standing in front of it. This began to dovetail with my longstanding interests in computer graphics and virtual environments, which due to their dependence on the user's subjective viewpoint, most often use this same visual perspective. With an image drawn from this type of perspective, one may feel as if they are no longer looking at an objective depiction of a space, but are looking into or existing inside it.

I was also interested in the relationship between abstract and representational imagery in painting, a pretty common painting concern. I was particularly curious about how the context of a semi-representational setting could influence the reading of an abstract shape. My early paintings were trying to smash these two types of representation together. I was then intrigued by the possibility of expanding this idea further into the work's form and I began layering projected 3D computer graphics on top of the mixed-media paintings I was doing.

A few of your pieces, such as Untitled (Standards) (2009), Bounce Room 1(2009), and Bounce Room 2(2009), depict standard figures and shapes used in digital animation, such as balls and the Utah teapot. Why are these ubiquitous and recognizable figures featured so prominently in your work?

Untitled (Standards) may be the most intentional in acknowledging these standard objects' historical roles like you mention. The objects in the piece are shown as some type of archetypical virtual object reverently being preserved in a timeless environment. Most of the models on the pedestals in that piece are rendered with the actual data from Stanford where they were originally digitally scanned (all but the teapot). It's interesting to think of these early models as an origin story for computer graphics and the starting point for a new kind of visual experience. When a new 3D graphics technology is developed, out of some sense of lineage or tribute, the creators make sure that rendering a teapot or a clay bunny work nicely. I find something funny and compelling about that.

On the other hand, Bounce Room 1 and Bounce Room 2 are using that aesthetic for more economical reasons. I think both of these works are attempting to embody something basic about their form in order to make the co-operative relationship between the two separate elements as evident as possible; a one-point perspective painting with a projected digital image overlaid. The digital projection represented as three red, green, and blue spherical lights; and the painted environment as five flat planes receding in perspective. That's about as far as I could boil them down to. Separately they are elementary and flat, but when they come together, the simulated light and physics of the spheres bouncing around in the space becomes illusionistic. Bounce Room 2 complicates things a little further by adding the wood structure and lights....